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Hike L01 The Bennett Heritage Trail Youtube video: Click to view Hike L01 The Bennett Heritage Trail

Over the past 20+ years of hiking, I have taken innumerable photos along the trails described in TorontoHiking. Each of the 60+ hikes usually meant at least tree hikes on a particulat trail to decide on the trail and loops to include. Subsequent hikes were needed to obtain a good gps track and data.

So now that we haven't been able to hike much due to Covid-19 restrictions and trail closures, I thought I would spend some time organizing some of those photos. The thought came to me that I could put these into a quality video slideshow. But that presented problems. I have never worked with video editing but was game to give it a try. I did have some video footage shot on the trails but in a large number of cases the quality was poor and the video was shaky. In any case I didn't need it for a video slideshow -at least not now.

I did a lot of research on slideshows and decided to look for a template I could use. I got some great ideas from those but most of them were very limited in the number of photos they could accommodate. So eventually I decided to make my own as I learned more and more about using Premiere Pro. I thought it would be a good idea to make an introductory sequence that I could use on all of the slideshows if I were to make more than one.

This called for a number of hiking/woods related videos. Fortunately there are a lot of photographers who post and donate their video clips on various sites for anyone to use free of charge. I found a few video opener templates and thought I could modify them to add my own clips and other changes to make a 15  s opener to attach in front of the title and slideshow.

The hardest part was finding appropriate background music to add to the video and you can judge if what I used is appropriate. Youtube is very particular about NOT using any copyrighted music so the need was to look for music that was free to use.

I wanted the slideshow to feature some motion but not use a bunch of dazzling effects between slide which quickly become tiresome. The individual slides all flow in and out from different directions at times and I added some motion to the slides in the form of rotation (very sparingly) and tilt and swivel on others to give a 3D look.

So a few days ago, I combined all the parts: opener + title + slideshow + credits into one 5:38 minute 1080p HD video showing 60 slides and posted it on youtube. I'd like you to take a look and give me appropriate feedback. Is it too long? Is the music appropriate? Is the opener too fast? Are there too many slides? Should 60 slides be 50 or ? This would give me some guidance on making another similar video for another hike.

If you'd like to be notified on any future videos for other hikes please Subscribe to the TorontoHiking youtube channel. Don't worry there won't be a lot of notifications :) And your feedback would help a lot. Thanks...